In the introductory episode of Deconstructing the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, investigative journalists Vanessa Beeley and Cory Morningstar join social commentator Forrest Palmer in a 90-minute podcast about NGOs as “instruments of power.” On this thought-provoking program, these international thought leaders from France, Canada and the US discuss how the complex has become an “apparatus to escalate conflict” against challenges to US hegemony, while maintaining a humanitarian veneer.

Examining the Syria conflict–rooted in the competition between the Turkey-US pipeline and the Iran-Russia pipeline–these members of the communication avant-garde expose the void of alternative media coverage about the funding of PR campaigns by the “upper echelon of white power” at the World Bank, UN and Wall Street through such instruments as Avaaz, Purpose, and Democracy Now. With the Netflix propaganda film White Helmets on fast-track to an Oscar nomination, the cabal of oil mafia-funded NGOs is indeed “shifting the narrative.”

Combined with the post 9/11 brainwashing in academia, social indoctrination has made questioning authority unacceptable in both schools and social media. Meanwhile, the “controlled left,” i.e. Amy Goodman and Naomi Klein, exemplify ‘radical’ white privilege, while simultaneously covering up the corporate corruption they are an essential yet clandestine part of.

As noted in the above article and book review, visual shapes illustrate emotions, and merge with verbal meanings to create a holistic rhetorical message. Through the manipulation of simple shapes into a typopictorial design, and consequently the activation of existing mental associations, logos communicate prosperity, hope, and ideas that are relevant to people.

Press photographs have a narrative structure, and are part of an interactional system involving the relationship between the image, viewers, and the participants represented in the image. The compositional system involves framing, salience, and the reading path of the image.

In this structure, the nucleus includes the heading, the image, and a prosodic tail. The heading often relies on wordplay, calling on experiences of the reader to decode, while the image tends to depict represented participants in an eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing manner. The satellite is the caption text that consists of the experiential orientation and the contextual extension. The experiential orientation functions to clarify and sharpen our understanding of the image, while the contextual extension aims to extend beyond what is needed for readers to understand the image

We now have three generations of Americans who came of age during major political scandals in the White House: Watergate (Richard M. Nixon), Iran-Contra (Ronald W. Reagan), and the Plame affair (George W. Bush). The last generation to come of age during a White House administration that worked for Main Street rather than Wall Street (Franklin D. Roosevelt) is fading fast.

The benefits we take for granted today, i.e. Social Security, Food Stamps and Medicare, came out of the New Deal programs of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Those benefits, however, were not a gift from the U.S. Government; they were, rather, an achievement by the American people, through organized efforts to confront Wall Street in Congress and in every state and city across the country, where millions suffered the indignity of poverty during the Great Depression, caused by the financial elite. Turning things around today requires no less.

Free to Expose Corruption, International Journal of Communication 2016, examines the impact of media freedom, internet access, and governmental online service delivery on corruption. With the caveat that corrupt regimes have learned to use the Internet to their advantage, the authors note that blogs, citizen journalism, and social networking sites (SNS) “produce the type of content that is necessary for accomplishing the social functions formerly filled by newspapers”.

Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer and controlling shareholders Michael Lacey and James Larkin were charged with conspiracy to commit pimping using classified ads. The investigation, prompted by reports from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, “found that many of the ads for prostitution services involved victims of sex trafficking, including children under the age of 18.” California Attorney General Kamala Harris said that Backpage was designed as an online brothel.

Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir, reviewed by Sarah Irving for Electronic Intifada, is the story of exile by a refugee from the fertile plains of the Naqab, where his family’s fields were plowed by camel. As the son of a paramount chief of the Tarabin Bedouin, Salman Abu Sitta attended university in Cairo, but recalls the attack on his father’s home and the Israeli massacres in Gaza.

The irony of Kevin Gosztola’s satire on Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein is that it isn’t. He may very well think so, but the reality is that Stein–like former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader–is running a campaign that benefits the Republican candidate. Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton, despite her serious flaws, because he understands the consequences of putting a white nationalist supporter in the Oval Office. Gosztola apparently doesn’t.